Touching Spaces in Textures

Touch has many layers of meaning, especially so in the affectivity unleashed by humor, where touching spaces often emerge in deconstructive ways that affect the senses, alter sense-making, and generate productive forms of non-knowledge (NichtWissen) and power-lessness (OhnMacht). The study discusses the works of various thinkers, including Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Frantz Fanon, Helmuth Plessner, Jacques Derrida, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, bell hooks, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Achim Geisenhanslüke. Drawing on such critical theories and poetically generated epistemologies of literary works the study illuminates venues for transformative thought while also paying attention to the ethics of dialogicity and the relation between philosophy and literature.

Mariam Popal is associate professor (PDin) in comparative literature/world literature at the Universität Bayreuth. She holds an M.A. and a Ph.D. from the Universität Hamburg and a habilitation (second thesis) in general & comparative literature from the Universität Bayreuth. She is a member of the Cluster of Excellence Africa Multiple, and an associate scholar in american studies at the Universität Potsdam. She has taught and conducted research at the Universität Freiburg, the Universität Basel, the University of Toronto, the Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the University of Alberta.